Healthcare App Development: Benefits and Challenges You Need to Consider

Gone are those days when a healthcare specialist has to take a complete round of the hospital to find a nurse, a colleague or some valid information, or wait for the patient to collect reports, or contact the receptionist regarding bills.

With digital tools and technologies ruling the healthcare space, the clinicians can collect and share data without compromising on the comfort of their seat and the quality of service they offer. They can offer a plethora of benefits and services to their patients under the umbrella mobile technology, as well as smoothen their lives. To make it more clear, let’s have a look at the benefits of having a mobile healthcare application before jumping to the challenges of healthcare app development and ways to tackle them for more effective outcomes:

Benefits of mHealth apps

The spectrum of advantages of mobile apps to the healthcare industry varies drastically depending on the demand of target audience and technological innovations concerned. There’s no ‘one-size-fits-all’ mHealth approach and solutions. However, the commonly found perks of mobility technology to the healthcare industry include:

Real-time Data Gathering

Through wearables and IoT, the mobile apps easily collect the human health-related data and share with the doctors in real-time. This has reduced the time consumed by the process and made it more effective.

Remote Diagnostics and Monitoring

The time and distance gap is no more a barrier to top-quality healthcare services, thanks to healthcare app development technology. The patients and doctors can communicate and come up with better solutions while sitting in two distinct cities. They need not go through the hassle of commuting and cost for medical services. In other words, remote diagnosis and monitoring have become far effective with mobile healthcare solutions.

Clinical Information Management

Mobile applications have almost put the paperwork to an end. The medical practitioners can get to know about their appointment, payment process and access various other such information via a mobile application. And the best part is that they can easily search for a particular detail from the backup stored.

Seamless Clinical Processes

From booking to consultation, payment and medical data exchange, everything is done by mobile apps. This has cut down the burden of hospital faculty to a half. The queue of patients has reduced since they can directly collect their reports and ask for a prescription to their doctors via the app. Besides, practitioners need not go through the long process to know if a particular equipment/person is free. They can directly communicate on the mobile platform and get an instant response.

Lower Cost

Mobile apps are emerging out as the single mode of communication and marketing for the healthcare service providers. The hospitals and other medical service providers need not invest in different means to communicate inside and out, and market their business.

Brand Promotion

Mobile apps are creating brand awareness in multiple ways. With location-based technology, the apps are helping the healthcare service providers to keep the local patients engaged with their brand. The messaging service of the apps keeps the patients, doctors and other service providers in sync, boosting brand loyalty.

Better Communication

Mobile apps have bolstered the communication process between the patients and clinicians. Now, they can directly interact with one another and get the updates via chat or call anytime and anywhere.

Improved Quality

With access to real-time data and enhanced communication process, the healthcare practitioners can easily understand the medical conditions and provide the right healthcare services at the right time. Thus, the quality of healthcare has improved with the evolution of mHealth applications.

The mobile technology proves to bring a wave of disruption in the healthcare domain, but with some hidden barriers. Wondering what these barriers are? Without making an ado, let’s move towards the challenges associated with creating a healthcare mobile application.

Challenges of Healthcare app development

According to our healthcare app development team, following are the prime challenges faced while building a mobile healthcare application:

Security

Since mHealth apps store valuable patient and clinical data, they have become the main target of cyber attackers. The data breach cases related to medical applications are increasing rapidly, indicating the paramount importance to invest in the advanced security measures. Maintaining a higher level of security, especially when the users do not invest in best tools to keep their personal devices secure, has become a challenge for the app developers.

Ease of Use

Setting up complex security measures and technique might make the app hack-free. However, it also has a downside – the app becomes slow and complicated. Most of the users are not tech-savvy and find it difficult to use the app with such updates. Thus, providing high security while making the app navigational flow simple and effective is again a challenge for the healthcare service providers.

Patient Engagement

Keeping patient aware of each and every detail related to their health is necessary to nurture a strong relationship. However, maintaining a balance between transparency and privacy is another challenge for the healthcare service providers. They have to ensure that only required information is disclosed to the patients.

Data Privacy

Ensuring data privacy by considering compliances like HIPAA is yet another challenge that developers deal with.

No ROI

Since the mobile technology is not yet adopted by the entire healthcare industry, the early birds find it tough to understand the processing of the app and evaluate profit/ROI gained.

Market Trends

With the rapidly changing market, the healthcare app development trends keep on changing. To integrate those trending technologies and technique into the healthcare app services without making it complicated or appear useless to the patients is a challenge to the healthcare experts.

By the way, if you are willing to know about the top healthcare app trends to follow in 2018, refer this blog.

Now, as you know the main challenges faced during healthcare app development, act wisely. Research well, make better strategic plans and increase your success chances.